4 Reasons Hollywood Sucks (And It's All Our Fault)

Which is weird, because I really like movies. All throughout my childhood and teenage years, I absorbed films like a chubby, pasty, dateless sponge. I watched everything -- good, bad, horribly good, hilariously bad; Rashomon to Fist of the North Star, Casablanca to The Rocketeer -- and I loved everything I watched. But now, even though my whole job revolves around pop culture and my wife has a stack of free movie tickets as her work's way of apologizing for all of the violence and poop, I cannot bring myself to watch a new movie. I'm not just bitter and jaded, either. Because I understand something people don't want to acknowledge: Hollywood sucks.

And it's all our fault.

#4. Appealing to Our Stupid Interests

Getty

Damn near every movie is successful, in some niche market or another. Whether that's with the nerd crowd, or the sports crowd, or parents dragging hateful children to anything colorful that will get them to shut up for 90 minutes, or foreigners watching American blockbuster garbage because they don't have to understand the dialogue to enjoy it, practically everything seems to be turning a profit. That's why we got three Transformers sequels and a new G.I. Joe movie in the pipes. Do you know anybody, literally anybody, who left G.I. Joe going "Boy howdy, I can't wait to see where the story goes from here!"?

Source."Does Snake Eyes continue punching, or does he switch to kicks? I need closure for his character arc!"

This problem is broader than just Hollywood, though. And I think the Internet is to blame. Back in the pre-Internet days when young boys had to masturbate to clothing catalogs instead of German Pokemon Cosplay Scat Porn, being into anything outside of the mainstream wasn't a hobby, it was an occupation. If you liked anime back in the '80s, you spent every waking moment patrolling the sketchy backrooms of comic book shops, or thumbing through the "beneath the table" bins at the nebulously Asian stall at the local flea market. If you were into the underground comic book scene, you mail-ordered your titles through obscure catalogs found next to free campus maps and STD pamphlets at the college coffee shop. And God help you if you liked indie games: You spent every weekend trading blowjobs for floppy disks behind the town's only computer/vacuum repair store, silently wishing through the tears that you didn't have enough ROM to save this memory.

But you did.

You always did.

Getty"This comes with 4GB, but you only need 128k to carry shame with you forever."

But not now, thanks to the easy connectivity of the Internet. These days, literally any filthy, subterranean Morlock demographic can be easily accessed, informed and exploited. Got a vulgar comedy about a living teddy bear? Twenty years ago, that's a worn cassette in the "cult" section of the video store; now it's a nationwide theater release. Got a disjointed, ranty, philosophical, existentialist character comedy? That used to be called "bombing at the community college fiction workshop's open read night." Now it's a studio-funded, star-studded venture. Sure, nothing is a guaranteed success, but the accessibility of obscure markets makes sure nothing is quite as big a failure as it could have been, 20 years ago.

And that's actually a positive thing, most times.

In theory, a diverse but well-informed audience works to ensure that studios can try risky new properties without fear of catastrophic financial meta-fuckery. But that assumes Hollywood wants to greenlight quality work that appeals to a variegated audience. That is not now, nor has it ever been, the style in which Hollywood rolls.

Getty"I roll three ways, baby: in a pile of coke, over the hopes and dreams of aspiring young actors, and down grassy hills. That shit's just fun."

No, the swagger with which Hollywood staggers is more about rehashed, hastily constructed crap, slapped together out of spare parts and kicked out the door to be devoured by the slavering masses before it even has a chance to curse an uncaring God for giving it life in the first place. That's not news; it's not unique to these modern days or anything. It's always been that way. It's just that the crap used to be a little less fringe, so it skated under the cultural radar. Now we see there's, holy shit, another Madea movie getting a theater release?

But no, it's a real thing. It's a real movie, that real people will pay real dollars to see, even though nobody you know has ever seen a Tyler Perry movie, much less any of the 12 that came out this week. There are millio-

Jesus Fucking Christ. Is this like the middle-aged black woman's version of Police Academy? Why are there so many sequels to Grown Man Farts into Granny Panties: The Movie?

Ahem. But I digress. The point is, there are millions of viewers out there, wholly separated from the mainstream, who are lining up every other midnight to get them a piece of that sweet, sassy, tranny grandma action. As fringe groups, we used to get one, maybe two movies ever that even mentioned our shamefully specific interests, but now we're guaranteed a slew of cynical attempts to cash in on those interests several times a year. We used to get a Batman movie once a decade, now we get a Green Lantern every financial quarter; we used to get a Tron once in a lifetime, now we get Tron: Legacy every dang weekend.

#3. Our Obsession With Novelty

Getty

As audiences, we prize novelty above all things in our modern movies. It's the reason M. Night Shyamalan briefly had a career, before we all woke up and realized that no matter how impressive it is that you can pull a pile of shit out of thin air, you're still ultimately holding a pile of shit. I'm as guilty of this as anybody: Throw an interesting angle or a novel plot device at me, and I start getting all pre-teen-girl excited for any kind of movie. Hell, I was all stoked to see Surrogates, at first, before I realized it was Surrogates just in time to stop myself from watching Surrogates. It doesn't help that science fiction, my particular jam, is most guilty of the gimmick film: Inception, Chronicle, Looper -- they're all new and novel and inventive enough angles to shove money pistons firmly into our nerdgears, but once the novelty wears off, what's left? I truly enjoyed Inception, I did, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what it was about. Dreams, right? And like, shooting? That sounds good. I'll go with that: Inception was about that kid from 3rd Rock shooting dreams in the face.

And now I'm all nerd-tumescent for Looper, but why is that? Because 3rd Rock looks like he's in the middle of possessing Bruce Willis' body and something something time travel? That's all I know about it. I'm excited on the basis of nothing, on the very teaser of a premise, because novelty is the only hook movies have left. It's like they've completely ceded character and dialogue and plot in favor of something -- anything -- mind-bending. I don't mean to call out these movies as shitty or anything, I'm just saying that I walked out of Inception going "Whoa! That was amazing!" and now couldn't tell you a single thing about it beyond "Gilbert Grape plays Freddy Krueger." But I've seen The Fifth Element like 60 fucking times. That was an objectively terrible movie, I know, but it at least thought about trying to make me give a shit about the characters.

It didn't succeed or anything, because y'know, Chris Tucker -- but it gets points for effort.